st: Re: A comment on abbreviations

Guilty as charged! But sometimes fast turnaround on the list renders such
practices necessary. At the end of the day, Stata understands you when you
enter -h prob-: The correct help file appears, so it is possible to
understand what the line "prob f p w" means.
Secondly, the output that appears on screen after the command also clearly
says what Stata has just calculated.
I was not aware that there was an FAQ explicitly prohibiting abbreviations.
Sorry about that...

Abbreviations make it easier to write a text, but more difficult to read
it. Especially if your experience with the language is limited,
abbreviations make life difficult. I have the impression that the use of
abbreviations at Statalist have increased during the last months, and
recently a response included this:
prob f p w

It means
probit foreign price weight
- and that is much easier to read.

The Statalist FAQ includes good advice, mostly to less experienced users
seeking help. I think it should also include this advice to the more
experienced users offering help: